haven't I? I
usually do make a mess of everything I undertake. You'd better beware
of me after this."

His "I'll risk it" was a whole cyclopedia of condensed gallantry.

They sat inept for a time, thinking aimlessly, seeing nothing, hearing
only the bated breath of the night wind groping stealthily through the
tree-tops, and from far beneath, the still, small voice of a brook
feeling its way down its unlighted stairs.

At last her voice murmured, "Are you quite too horribly uncomfortable
for words?"

His voice was a deep-toned bell somehow articulate: "I couldn't be
more comfortable except for one thing. I'm all out of cigars."

"Oh!" He had a vague sense of her mental struggle before she spoke
again, timidly:

"I fancy you don't smoke cigarettes?"

"When I can't get cigars; any tobacco is better than none."

Another blank of troubled silence, then, "I wonder if you'd say that
of mine."

Her voice was both defiant and trepidate. He laughed. "I'll guarantee
to."

A few years before he would have accepted a woman's confession that
she smoked cigarettes as a confession of complete abandonment to all
the other vices. A few years farther back, indeed, and he would have
said that any man who smoked cigarettes was worthless. Since then he
had seen so many burly heroes and so many unimpeachable ladies smoke
them that he had almost forgotten his old prejudice. In some of the
United States it was then against the law for men (not to say women
and children) to sell or give away or even to possess cigarettes.
After the war crusades would start against all forms of tobacco, and
at least one clergyman would call every man who smoked cigarettes a
"drug-addict." It is impossible for anybody to be moral enough not to
be immoral to somebody.

But intolerances go out of style as suddenly as new creeds come in. He
knew soldiers who held a lighted stub in one hand while they rolled a
cigarette with the other. He knew Red Cross saints who could puff a
forbidden cigarette like a prayer. He wondered how he or any one had
ever made such a fierce taboo of a wisp of aromatic leaves kindled in
a tiny parcel. Such strange things people choose for their tests of
virtue--tests that have nothing whatever to do with the case, whether
savage or civilized folk invent them.

He heard Miss Webling fumbling in a hand-bag. He heard the click of
her rings against metal. He heard the little noise of the portals of a
cigarette-case opening. His